1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to advanced composites and, more particularly, to a system and method for rapidly fabricating advanced-composite laminates with low scrap using automated equipment.
2. Background of the Invention
Advanced composite materials are increasingly used in high-performance structural products that require low weight and high strength and/or stiffness. Composite materials are engineered materials that comprise two or more components. This patent relates to polymer composites that combine reinforcing fibers such as carbon fiber, glass fiber, or other reinforcing fibers with a thermosetting or thermoplastic polymer resin such as epoxy, nylon, polyester, polypropylene, or other resins. The fibers typically provide the stiffness and strength in the direction of the fiber length, and the resin provides shape and toughness and transfers load between and among the fibers. Structural performance of an advanced composite part increases with increased fiber-to-resin ratio (also called fiber volume fraction), increased fiber length, degree of fiber orientation to line up with a part's loads (in contrast to random fiber orientation), and the straightness of the fibers. Weight of an advanced-composite part can also be improved by selectively adding or subtracting material according to where it is highly and lightly stressed.
Typically, the manufacture of high-performance, advanced-composite parts is a slow and labor-intensive process. Thus, several approaches for automating the fabrication of advanced composite parts have been developed to reduce touch labor, decrease cycle time, and improve part quality and repeatability. Such machines are used to fabricate small and large parts ranging from entire plane fuselages to pressure vessels, pipes, blades for wind turbines, and wing skins. These machines typically place tape material directly on a mandrel or a mold using a material placement head mounted on a multi-axis numerically controlled machine. As the material is laid up, it is consolidated with any underlying layers. This is called “in situ” consolidation.
A different approach, described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,607,626 and 6,939,423, which are herein incorporated by reference, is to lay up a flat “tailored blank” where all the plies of the composite laminate are only tacked together. Once the tailored blank has been made, subsequent processing steps are used to consolidate the plies together and form the blank into its final shape.
One characteristic typical to tape and fiber placement machines is the overall technique used to apply material to a tooling surface: machines progressively unroll a tape or tow material onto a tooling surface and tack it in place using one or more compaction rollers or shoes as the material is fed onto the surface. While this technique yields high quality parts, one main limitation is that increasing material placement speed requires larger, higher power machines, which have a compounding effect on system size, energy consumption, cost, and precision. In many systems, speed is also constrained by heat transfer, especially for thermoplastic composites that are typically melted and then refrozen during placement.